Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Immediately following the work I did on the IRIS campaign I started getting briefed on Believe. This was to be the experiential site that was going to accompany a larger TV campaign. The Agency in charge of the TV spots had commissioned New Deal Studios to build a 30x40 foot diorama of the Battle of New Mombasa (where Master Chief saved the day... yet again) which was populated with several hundred figurines made by Stan Winston Studios.

The whole thing was shot on 2 motion control rigs over 2 days. The footage was then stitched together and had the sky roto'd out.

My involvement was doing the sky replacement (including learning how to do 3d tracking with no prior experience), roto for the various rotating characters that appear when you click one of the floating icons, and the motion tracking for all the clickable hotspots in the timeline.

This was another project for Xbox. It involved a lot of actors drawing illustrated objects in the air. The bulk of my involvement in this project was in the planning stages to figure out the most effective way to achieve the drawing effect given the limited in house resources and budget available to us.

The method we decided on was to do point tracking in after effects and use Trapcode Particular to emit a trail of particles for the line writing. For some of the larger objects in the site we just made the trails wider and used them to mask on pre composed objects and type.

In the end I wound up only producing 2 of the final shots (seen below). Both shots are for idol loops that play when the site has been sitting undisturbed for a bout a minute or so. These are only 2 of about 12 that were embedded in the final sight. So if you're looking for these in the actual site, it may take a while.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Iris is one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on. By the time it got to me the idea and structure had been flushed out but all I got was "we're going to make an ARG, it will be long and complicated, and at the end of each part we want there to be a video being played through an alien server."

When they asked for that they had no idea what anything was going to look like. The server, the environment it was housed in, and the video itself were all up for grabs. So I along with my immediate supervisor set about designing the actual servers themselves. We each came up with 4 different designs, and internally decided on 1 that could be subtly modified and repeated to create 5 different servers. Mine didn't get chosen which meant I was tasked with the rest of the materials needed to make the servers.

This turned out to be the best job I could have ever hoped for. I wound up being put in charge of all the environments that the servers would be housed in as well as all of the content videos that would play when the user figured out which symbol to click on.

There were Five in total. For the most part they were edited with Final Cut Pro, and tweaked, colored, and effected in After Effects. When the videos called for assets that couldn't be bought as stock footage, or shot locally, I wound up doing some work in Maya to fill in the gaps.

Hello, my name's Matt. As of this moment right now I'm working as a Motion Graphics artist at AKQA in San Francisco. I've been working there for 3 years and 7 months, which is 2 weeks longer than I've been out of school.

Having now been out in the working world for longer than the sum of my post high school education, I've decided it's time to seriously consider my career and maintain my work, achievements, and personal projects in a single location.Somewhere I can easily update and watch my body of work grow and evolve.I also want to have a place to refer potential employers to.

So here begins what I am going to be treating as a constantly updating portfolio. It will end up being more than that, but for now I’ll be posting about projects I’ve worked on along with video clips of my work.

If you’re interested in learning more about me / e-stalking me. Feel free to check out the following links: